"When I was in college in the mid-1970s, Carl Andre was god. For those of us striving to be serious artists, writers, and art historians, Andre was the paragon. His art was coolly intellectual, deceptively simple and austere, yet surprising and provocative... I knew about Carl’s poems early on, but there was a lot more to discover. In the late 1960s, the dealer Seth Siegelaub encouraged Andre to publish his poetry and they produced Seven Books. They were Xerox copies made when the photo-copy machine was a new technology. For each poem he wrote, Carl made several carbon copies. He’d send one to Hollis Frampton or Sol Lewitt, and distributed the others only to his closest friends. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has a wonderful and in-depth collection of Andre’s poems."

Yasmil Raymond, co-curator of Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010, Dia:Beacon, May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015, from a conversation with David Ebony for Yale University Press, 2014.

This carbon copy of Andre's poem "de Kooning Gorky Pollack" is the only known version in this format. The poem was devised in three sheets in the format of a list, rather than one continuous block of text, of which the original and 13 xerox copies are known. The location of the original from which the present carbon copy was made is no longer known, and may no longer exist.

About Carl Andre

Carl Andre is the overall-clad sculptor whom many historians consider a defining figure in the development of Conceptual and Minimalist art. Legend claims that Andre began his current practice after his close friend Frank Stella called the wooden castoffs of a project sculptural objects as well; Andre has also said that Constantin Brancusi was an instrumental influence. He first won public attention in the 1960s for his groundbreaking multi-part sculptures whose pieces were not fixed but lain directly onto the ground. In fact, Andre considers himself one of the first “post-studio” artists because he uses manufactured industrial materials that he does not alter, but rather arranges on-site; common materials include square plates or blocks made of aluminum, nickel, zinc, copper, steel, lead, limestone, and wood. Many of his arrangements are also based on arithmetic and geometry.